Sources Close to Hell

January 13, 2014

The Morning Heresy is your daily digest of news and links relevant to the secular and skeptic communities.

The NPR media criticism show On the Media (my favorite!) does an episode chock full of skeptical goodness. It's got fake science being reported as fact, journalists being duped by political ringers, creationism's stealth campaign, and even telemarketing cyborgs.

“The most precious resource a country has is not its visible infrastructure and wealth but what is inside people’s minds,” wrote Dr. Sierra in an article last year for CFI’s Free Inquiry magazine. “Just as there are dysfunctional policies, there are dysfunctional beliefs and traditions that can be costly to a country.”

Researchers from the University of Tampa and Iowa State University are conducting a survey on the beliefs of and goals of skepto-atheists. Click here if you want to take part.

CFI-DC's Simon Davis turns down the temperature on the excitement over atheism-experimenting pastor Ryan Bell, who was fired by his Christian employers:

[T]hese employers are under no obligation – legal or moral – to entertain Bell’s recent experimentation with atheism. The fact that he’s simply giving it a shot doesn’t change the fact that he is publicly stating his intention to not follow the the tenets that they require him to uphold.

This is kind of fascinating. The Boston Globeinterviews Dr. Josephine Briggs of the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine, and she's kind of, well, level-headed about what alt-med can't do, though seems rather bullish about placebos.

Not surprisingly, a lot of parents of kids with autism are turning to alt-med (40% in the study cited).

Neil deGrasse Tyson and the upcoming Cosmos reboot get cover treatment in the hyper-mainstream Parade. (And the photo of NdT makes him look like a plastic action figure. That's Parade for you, I guess.) Spoiler alert for the end of the article, it has a great nerd joke from a fan of Tyson's, 11-year-old Giuseppe Lombardo:

Playing off the size of a gigabyte (1,024 megabytes), [Giuseppe] asks, “Have you heard of the band 1020 Megabytes?” “No,” says Tyson, curious. “Of course you haven’t,” Giuseppe says. “They haven’t got any gigs yet!”

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Linking to a story or webpage does not imply endorsement by Paul or CFI. Not every use of quotation marks is ironic or sarcastic, but it often is.

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Paul Fidalgo has been communications director of the Center for Inquiry since 2012. He holds a master’s degree in political management from George Washington University, and has worked previously for FairVote: The Center for Voting and Democracy and the Secular Coalition for America. Paul is also an actor and musician whose work includes five years performing with the American Shakespeare Center. He lives in Maine with his wife and kids. His blog at the Patheos network is iMortal, and he tweets at @paulfidalgo.